The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Crews of nine men were assigned to it for five months at a time. These were men who, for the most part, were considered troublemakers, but at the same time, not so much so that they couldn’t be relied on. There was a lieutenant, a sergeant, two corporals and five privates. They trekked south with four wagonloads of supplies, and when they went back home, they’d take four empty wagons back with them.

  The men “worked” eight-hour shifts for six days of the week and had the last two days off. The next time they went to work, they started eight hours later, and again they worked six days on with two off. The second shift had their first day of work offset by two days, and they then repeated the same schedule of six on and two off and then rotating forward eight hours. The third and fourth shifts worked the same. The only one who had a different schedule was the lieutenant, who had to be awake only during the days and if anything untoward happened.

  Since that had happened exactly once, a hundred years before, no one held their breath.

  Generally speaking the people of the Fingers didn’t go to sea. The winds either blew from east to west or didn’t blow at all. Ships with sails couldn’t make any headway against the wind and ships with oars could, but they had to fight the wind. It was a nasty conundrum -- a ship small enough to row couldn’t carry enough food to sustain the crew, and a ship large enough to carry sufficient food was too large to row.

  A hundred years before, someone had seen a ship sailing south, off the East Finger. They had sent messengers speeding south, and a boat was sent out and intercepted the ship.

  There was nothing but corpses aboard; the sails were tattered ruins -- the ship was simply sailing free, following a southward-trending current. Rumor had it that there had been scrolls aboard, but nothing had ever been said officially.

  It was, Melek thought, part and parcel of the whole absurd thing. The last ship assigned here had been broken up for firewood fifty years before. All they could do if they saw a ship was to send a messenger running four hundred miles north to Arvala. He sniffed. Sure! That would work!

  He dragged his attention back to the view out the slit. It was a regrettable thing that East Finger was no longer the safe place it had once been; dralka were returning where they hadn’t been seen for a long time. True, there were none of the large terrestrial predators, predators that still frequented the lands north of the walls, but it was a different matter altogether to stop the flying predators. Once on the journey south, they’d had to dismount from the wagons and put up a spirited defense to save the draft beasts.

  It wasn’t that the aerial predators were stupid -- they weren’t. But they didn’t like to quit and so they kept at you for longer and pressed harder than anyone could be comfortable with. It was really exciting to try to fight predators with bows when there was only a six-inch patch that was two inches wide along the thin neck that wasn’t armored -- that and its anus. A throat wound would bring one down quickly; the other tended to take a while -- a while where it would keep trying to kill something.

  Those were called “dralka.” Dralka were bad, but they had larger cousins, the “dralha” that lived in the crags of the mighty mountains to the west. Dralka had long snouts filled with razor sharp teeth. One nip and you lost an arm or leg. The dralka would grab the severed limb and fly away with it. Dralha, the smaller ones, bit you in half and carried half your body away. The larger ones just took you all at once. The people of the Fingers had not a single weapon that could kill one. Twice, that Melek had heard of, someone had gotten lucky when one was on the ground, eating someone not so lucky, and who’d hit a dralha in the eye. Usually that killed one -- if not, it got very, very angry. You couldn’t even begin to run fast enough or dig deep enough if that happened.

  At midnight, when Little Brother was high in the sky, Corporal Destu relieved him and he saluted and retired to his bunk. The watch post was relatively warm, and was safe enough against anything, even a very determined dralha, but they didn’t live this far east. One hundred and fifty-seven days to go! All he had to do was grit his teeth and not lose track of what was important. Still, this was shit!

  How could Melek have known that the cutpurse he’d killed in the act was acting on a dare and that his father was a city councilor?

  * * *

  Kris woke up the next morning and saw that the sun was further up than she would have expected. She looked at her watch and started. It was just four am! Then she whacked her head with her hand. Why would days here be the same length as back home? Andie had it right -- this wasn’t Kansas!

  Still, she had to pee and went into her backpack and looked at the half roll of TP she had. This was, she realized, a serious problem... TP hadn’t been on their emergency supplies list. Worse, she’d have to walk a quarter mile to the nearest bush, and it wouldn’t hide much of anything.

  She gathered up her flashlight and went looking around the perimeter of the outer chamber and found an indentation that was about ten feet deep. She had to laugh when she saw it. There was a bench about two feet off the ground along one side, with a row of prosaic holes along it. She flashed her light inside and saw that there was a space about six feet deep. There was no smell that she could detect; moreover, she didn’t feel the urge to check more than to find out if the wood would hold her. It seemed quite sturdy and she sighed with relief.

  When she went out, Andie was stirring and Kris took her by the hand and led her to the latrine and left her to her business. Andie appeared shortly afterward, also looking relieved. “God! I needed that! I needed that yesterday!”

  “It looks like a regular outhouse, Andie. I mean, it fits our butts.”

  “The leaves weren’t much use,” Andie said sourly. “I mean, the ones I grabbed turned to grit.”

  “I have a half roll of TP,” Kris told her friend.

  Andie’s eyes gleamed. “Gimme!” She took it and vanished in the direction she’d just come from.

  Ezra had woken up and was lying on one elbow watching her. “What?” she asked.

  “A half roll of TP for two people -- that’s got to bite! I suppose I might contribute one of my two rolls to the cause, if you ask me nice,” he told her.

  “Pretty please,” Kris asked.

  He rolled over and dug in his pack and tossed her a roll. “Have you used field latrines before?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “You’ll want to find a way to secure that roll well. You know how a slice of bread always lands jelly-side down? Guess where a roll of toilet paper heads like it’s a homing missile?”

  “Crap!” Kris said.

  “Exactly,” he told her. “And, if you don’t have toilet paper, can I assume you don’t have tampons, toothpaste, toothbrushes and the like?”

  Kris shut her eyes. She and Andie really were children playing at explorer.

  He laughed. “Kris, you two did amazingly well. You realize we’d be in deep, deep trouble without that food back there. We’d be in worse trouble without the water. In the army, we had courses in logistics for those who had the responsibility. I just did a lot of backpacking.”

  “I thought I did, but it’s been a while,” she admitted. “I forgot everything. No, no toothpaste or toothbrush. Two tampons. Andie...”

  “Andie what?” Andie said, returning.

  “I didn’t bring any TP... Ezra points out that means that you are probably like me -- no toothpaste, no toothbrush and no Tampax.”

  “Well, I have some toothpaste and a toothbrush -- and that’s it. I’m going to need something in a couple of days.”

  “While you’re beating yourself up about those things,” Ezra told them, “you might as well add extra shoes, socks, underwear -- clothes in general. Neither of you brought hats, I take it? Bath soap?”

  Kris and Andie exchanged looks of utter consternation. Andie recovered first. “Well, in that case, they’ll have a real treat if they don’t rescue us in a few days.”

  “More important,” Ezra told her, “the shoes-and-socks thing will limit o
ur mobility after a while. It takes years to get your feet used to walking without shoes.”

  “I have sturdy shoes and so does Kris,” Andie told him.

  He shook his head. “I had tough army boots. Usually, if I was lucky, they’d last for a month in the field. If I was going for a walk, I packed at least one extra pair of boots and two dozen pairs of heavy socks. When you’re limited to moving on foot, you can’t take care of your feet well enough.”

  He wagged a finger at them. “You have to listen to me, okay? This is serious. A blister, even a hot spot and you speak up and we’ll see what we can do. Mess up your feet and we’re tied to one spot.”

  “We’re tied to this spot anyway,” Andie told him.

  “Yeah, but we can’t wait forever, Andie. In a couple of weeks, we’re going to need to scout around, at the very least. We’ve got 550 gallons of water. We might get by with a quart a day apiece, but that’ll be hard. In the army, the guys who are careful get along well enough on two quarts a day. Four quarts in a gallon mean we have 2200 quarts. Three people, 700 quarts each. More likely just 200 days worth.

  “Right now the temperature is relatively mild, but this looks like desert... there’s no way to tell for sure what season this is. Come local summer and we could be hard put to keep it to gallon a day, each. That drops our water supply to just two months.”

  “And here I thought I was being clever,” Andie said, sounding down.

  “Andie, you’ve given us a couple of months of easy survival. If we are careful, we can probably run it out to six months. Your father and Kris’ father aren’t going to wait that long. They could be here any minute. And then we would be rescued. But, it’s never too soon to start worrying about worst cases.”

  “My father was right, Ezra; you’re worth your weight in gold,” Kris told him.

  He laughed. “Yes and no. Candidly, anyone in my outfit who wasn’t telling you the same thing now, I’d fire their ass!”

  “Consider us fired, then,” Andie was more dejected than ever.

  “Andie! Wake up and smell the roses! People didn’t come to us until they’d had around two, three years of training. And we’re not talking about college -- twelve- or eighteen-hours a week crap. Nope, they were in class ten or twelve hours a day, six days a week. They usually had at least one combat tour as well. This isn’t your area of expertise, Andie. And no matter how much we might wish it to be so, we can’t be experts in everything. You’ve done well, trust me. I have no regrets, Andie. None.

  “Yeah, like you, I was lulled into complacency by how easy it was to get here. I wasn’t thinking about it any more than you. The stuff in my pack? It’s always there, ready to go.”

  He waved back into the cave. “Why don’t we sashay back there and see if they’re expecting us to make the first move?”

  They walked back to food store, and there was no blue door.

  Andie sounded frustrated. “Okay, I’m getting concerned. Maybe Shorty’s Fox Two doesn’t work. I can’t believe it. How long would it take to pack it up and bring it over to the house, even if fuckwad Art and dickhead Kit took a sledge hammer to the fusor there?”

  Ezra took a deep breath. “Andie, I mentioned it earlier and I’ll repeat it. You have to think worst cases, sometimes, even if it hurts. Think putsch. Revolution. Coup.

  “If there was an easy way for us to return, the plotters would be at serious risk. I don’t know the details, but they would need to find a way to make sure you couldn’t get back, and keep the others from trying to rescue you, and probably to keep them from talking.”

  “I have no idea how they could do that. There’s our parents, Linda, Shorty, Lin Xi... even Abe at Crenshaw was fascinated. They’d have had to kill my old man to stop him. Ditto Kris’ parents and the others. That’s six or eight dead. Someone would be curious.”

  “I think that and obviously, you do too. The problem is, the other side is in this to win... and I can guarantee you, that even idiots can surprise you. In fact, idiots can win, because they don’t think logically.”

  “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, damn, damn, damn!” Andie said, back to being depressed.

  “Before you get too down, think about something else. Kurt Sandusky and a number of some very good people have been helping me get by since the army and I parted company. He knows something, although out of respect to you, I didn’t tell him more than that I was doing the stuff of ‘wild blue yonder dreams.’ I doubt if either Kit or Art recognize he exists -- well, maybe that Kit asshole, but I never talked to him except in passing. Mr. Boyle went straight to Kurt and then straight to me.

  “If my friends think something happened to me, they’ll start digging. Andie, we’re artillery pukes. We don’t use entrenching tools -- we use high explosives. Those two have no idea how hard my friends will be asking questions. No idea at all. And your old man, Kris, is a billionaire. Never ever fuck with someone with a bank account that runs to nine or ten digits in front of the decimal place.”

  “So, keep our chins up, our powder dry and what...?” Andie asked.

  “Well, Kris found the potties a while ago. I think it’s clear that the chamber next to this one was used for storage or something, while the big one was where people lived. Let’s go back to the big room and explore further and see what else we can find.”

  Kris looked at him and then at Andie. “I signed up for exploration, Andie.”

  “Yeah, but I hadn’t expected to include outhouses and trash heaps in what we were looking for,” Andie replied. “Exploration isn’t nearly as cool as they tell us.”

  Ezra chuckled. “The next time you read about an archaeological dig, you’ll wonder where they took their dumps.”

  “Eeew! It’s bad enough I gotta go!” Andie said with vehemence. “I don’t need to look for where others go.”

  They went back to the main chamber and spent a little time eating a small snack on Ezra’s advice and drinking a small cup of water before starting to explore.

  At one point, in the farthest part of the chamber from the door, there was a door about eight feet high and ten feet wide. Ezra flashed his light inside and then they entered. Andie and Kris followed, not sure why what looked like a cube thirty feet on a side was so interesting. Kris saw the spikes in the wall first, but she didn’t understand what she was seeing.

  The spikes were heavy pieces of iron, about two feet long, with the ends rolled into an eyelet, and with a small break so something could be hooked into it.

  Ezra scratched his head for a few minutes, and then slapped his fist into his palm. “I’ll be damned! Six by ten rows on three walls! A hundred and eighty!”

  “A hundred and eighty what?” Kris asked.

  “I suspect hammocks.”

  Kris eyed the room. “A hundred and eighty people slept in here? How did they get in the upper tiers?”

  “The iron bars would make steps of a sort.”

  Kris grimaced. The thought of living cheek and jowl with that many people was unpleasant. Worse, a little later, they found another chamber. There was an iron grate for a door and it was open. They went inside, and there were more of the bolts as in the hammock room, only these were short and anchored in the floor instead of the wall.

  Ezra shook his head. “I don’t think the people who lived here were very nice. I think this was for prisoners or slaves. Eye rings on the floor.”

  “Why not house them like the ones in hammocks?” Andie asked.

  He looked at her and sighed. “Andie, you live in the US of A, the land of the free, and the home of the brave -- and a great cornucopia of goods and freedoms.

  “If you were a woman and a slave, subject to serious overwork, repeated rapes and abuse, a header off the top tier might seem like a blessing. A slave keeper would know that and make allowances.” He started counting. “Call it a hundred women in about a quarter the space the men had. They probably had to sleep sitting up.”

  “Bastards!” Andie said with heat and venom.

  “
Yeah, but think on this, Andie. This place hasn’t been used for years -- and not just a few years, but maybe decades. These people are long gone and they haven’t come back.” He waved towards the entrance. “This isn’t a place you could keep a couple hundred people fed off the local area, and we’ve seen no sign of water, irrigation, or fields.

  “I don’t know what happened here, but I don’t think it happened overnight, and things were, I suspect, rough on everyone. I don’t approve of this any more than you do, but I’m not going to stand in judgment over people I’ve never met and who will never be able to tell me their side of the story.

  “And how would you feel fifty years from now if someone comes across our desiccated bodies and decides they can’t judge anyone who might have stranded us here?”

  “We’d like a chance to tell our stories, of course. Andie, justice isn’t doing what you want -- it’s doing what’s right, as best you can, with what you know.

  “Once, in the ‘Stan, a kid we knew and tossed candy to occasionally came running up to our Hummer. We knew him; he’d done it a hundred times. He got close and blew up. He sent a bunch of guys to the hospital, but he didn’t kill any of us.

  “We knew where he lived and we hit the place like a ton of bricks. The bastards had captured his family, we found out later, and told the kid that if he blew us up, they’d let his father, mother, brothers, and sisters go. They killed them all, though, as soon as the kid was out of sight.

  “You understand that we were there to rub that family out ourselves, right?”

  “Shit,” Kris said, feeling faint.

  “So, you do what you can, knowing that you have to be more than just a little sure.”

  “And the guy who told you what they did?” Andie asked.

  “You ever see the movie Commando?” Ezra asked. Before they could speak Ezra spoke first. “The colonel held the fucker upside down out the door of a chopper. The official report said that after questioning, he was released.”